UBRLOCAL Iteration 2

Virtual Food Co-op

Local food producers lack proper, scalable connections to local consumers.

Solution

An app helping producers find groups of consumers by connecting them through local distributors and a group buying website that gave discounts to collective buying.

This helped consumers get discounts on local food by buying collectively, and producers were able to sell more food with less waste.

Learnings

The scalability of local food is a large and complex problem. We eventually closed this prototype because local distributors ended up not being set up to sell efficiently to individual buyers. The most effective solution will require local and global food sources or a strictly bulk local food distribution.

Prototype

The latest prototype was created in Shopify and allowed users to buy in groups based on location. This test was eventually ended because test findings found issues with efficiencies in distribution to individual consumer needs.

Research

Market Accessibility Issues

9 out of 10 local producers in Washington were not able to sell their products at a Seattle Farmers Market because of lack of space of the producer wasn’t large enough. Online tools could help them collaborate, market and distribute their products and scale their production.

Distribution Issues

We learned that small producers were paying 70% at grocery stores. Grocery stores and government food policies favored industrial food systems. Small, local producers needed alternative, more affordable approaches to distribution and marketing.

Overall producers in Washington state and around the world needed help distributing their food, since they were doing distribution themselves and it took up too much of their time.

Producers needed:

– Affordable distribution that was closer to 30 to 40% rather then 70% of their sales

– A collaborative approach to work with other producers so that they could potentially offer more to their customers

– Logistics were key to their needs. It needed to be easy.

– Consumers to buy their products!

Understanding customer needs

Consumer Profilewas key to helping find customers for producers.

-Consumers are commonly interested in needing low prices

-Convenience

Persona Continuum

To develop our personas we established continuums and plotted our interviewees’ behavior. Categories included: how often users shopped, where they shopped, how much money was available for groceries, if they were active in their community.

User Research – Distributors and “Hosts”

Local food hubs were the key piece of the puzzle to helping scale business for local producers. Food hubs are agregation warehouses for local food and many were under utilized. We have been experimenting on group buying from these food hubs based on the idea of Hosts. Farmigo is using this concept, it’s the same as buying clubs. We’re looking to cooperatize that model and share profits within the groups.

Application Goals

Scale buying is key for producers to sell at scale, consumers to buy at discounts and distributors to build efficiency. We have been experimenting with group buying and group discounts.

Prototype

Prototype featured group buying and singular add ons. This was tested with 26 people at the Impact Hub.

Paper Prototype – We sold $600 worth of food in 10 hours of testing with 26 people

Take aways and next steps

Take aways (Iteration 2):

We learned that doing distribution ourselves was expensive. Our key strategy is now to work with other distributors and to empower local food hubs. Most food hubs need more customers, so an app focused on building community buying could help build interconnection of food hubs to communities. This comes with it’s own challenges of creating consistency and standards. Our app could help share data and make food hubs more competitive as well as help local food hubs scale.

We will continue by designing this next prototype for Anne, our food revolutionary and first adopter.